I regard exploring new possibilities, as an artist.. stretching into new things.. as being one of the most important things you can do.. and it’s probably true in most other walks of life. Generally it’s a kind of oscillation.. between that area where you are really strong.. and the new areas you’re just starting to explore… It’s about integrating these two things.

In some of my newer directions.. I have some fear that what I’m doing might be nieve… The reason being because I am venturing into areas that are more conventional then my work normally is.. so that if you’re taking you’re first few steps on a very well trotted road, how excited can you be about what you find? I mean.. sure, you’re excited.. but maybe for everyone else its “Ho hum, I’ve seen that before.”

Still.. it is still me making the music.. still a product of my aesthetic thinking.. my aesthetic sensibilities.. still something that largely comes from within..  still my process.. etc. So whatever it is I’m doing.. it’s still inescapably me.. still has a certain.. I’m not sure what.

Ultimately.. where I see the future in the new stuff is finding ways for it to be more and more imprinted with.. whatever it is that’s unique in me.. and integrating it with the older stuff. 

Into the New Music 

If  you’ve been listening to my stuff for any length of time.. you’ll note that this new track is basically an evolution of some of what we heard on ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures:

Glitchy Goodness mix (As of yet untitled early mix) by Matt Searles

What we hear here is what we were hearing in Deep Space.. but now arranged, mixed, and sorta composed around.. in a kind of new way. It’s been said that the Deep Space stuff was like exploring out into space.. and now we are listening in on Alien conversations..

It’s a crazy kind of dark and harsh ambient.. or that track is, isn’t it? Makes me feel like a journey into the shadow side of the soul.

About this direction

The direction opens up a whole lot in the way of possible possibilities… err, so let me describe the process of the above track.

Inside Reaktor 

I started out in Reaktor.. with a sound source by which you can make music / sound / whatever.. via twiddling some knobs with your mouse.. by twiddling the parameters of sequences, synthesizers, sound generators, effects processors, and mixers.. you can only adjust one parameter at a time.. and you tend to not do it too abruptly most of the time.. you spend a lot of time navigating the interface just to get so you can get the thing you want to tweak’s parameter…

Controlling one parameter at a time.. sorta slowly.. with gaps between where you can tweak.. has the effect of making for a somewhat slowly organically evolving sound.. and because we are talking about parameter tweaking.. its as if the resultant sound is.. well it sounds like its coming from the same device who’s pattern and behavior is shifting over time.. and expressive in that way.

Parallel Compression  

So you do this over and over again.. generating a few sound files.. and you take these sound files and submit them to an automated process of what is called “parallel compression.” Parallel compression means.. you have a sound source.. that gets thrown through many compressors working in parallel.. and you mix the outs of the various compressors.. indeed I mix the sends into the compressors as well as the sounds out.. The idea is that the various compressors you’re dealing with all color the sound in different ways.. in relationship to things like.. the dynamics of the audio.. and they also effect the dynamics of the audio differently..  

So we are both colorizing the sounds and shaping there dynamics.. the latter of which will allow us more control once we get to the mixing and arrangement process.

The Mixing and Arranging Process

Next I take the audio files and load them into my DAW.. Digital Performer. 

There’s certain interesting aesthetic issues that pop up about this point. Because each sound file was generated independently of one another.. there’s no “design” to there interrelationships accept that they were all created at the same tempo… There relationships of timber and pitch (counterpoint, harmony, orchestration).. are.. in essence indeterminate.. which kinda brings us into John Cage Country…

What is similar is that.. in many cases the effects treated to the instrument are the same.. or at least some of the effects are the same.. and they are all created via the same process.. so the way they evolve over time is very similar: Process dictates a probability distribution of attributes.. so that its as if there’s a systems level interrelationship of stuff.

The process of mixing and arranging is then our chance to insert a little design into the production.. For now I’m not doing anything much more sophisticated then deciding when an audio recording should be inserted into the arrangement, choosing additional effects for that instrument.. effects of the general mix.. and mixing the instruments.. –Although I have been creating custom stuff with say.. Native Instruments Machine.

The Mixing

In my conventionally unconventional music.. harmony is at least in part conceived of as 3 dimensional..  What I mean is.. the issue of overlapping frequency ranges is a central issue to the mix engineers stock and trade.. and some of how this is dealt with is panoramic positioning.. and just where a sound should be located in a virtual sound stage. Because in my music the mixing and the composition are integrated.. harmony is conceptualized in a context of spacial relationships.

So if you think about it.. the process of mixing.. can be like a process of contextualizing material.. which means embedding meaning into it..  and um.. that kinda thing.

What you end up doing is listening to the material of the audio.. the various audio files you have.. and asking questions.. What you do is making decisions about.. what to highlight at one moment or another.. what should be dominant in the mix.. how the sounds should interrelate.. how to make things interesting in terms of how the track evolves over time..

So in essence the mixing is the composing.. moving things around in space.. automating effects.. and all this kind of thing.

Where Maschine fits into all of this?

Maschine is in essence a pattern based percussive sequencer.. and a little bit more. You compose in it various patterns.. and then in your DAW you tell it when to play what patterns..

So, at the very least Maschine represents the possibilities of pattern based sequencing.. to my music.. something that’s very good for real time music production.. and based sequencing is a big part of what’s going on inside of Reaktor in much of this production.

Machine gets mixed in like any other element.. though its the one element where we have conscious control of.. so that it works to somehow.. fit things together.. I guess.. another layer of it..

Where to go from here

It seems to me that there’s an incredible number of possibilities moving forward from here.. I have an obvious interest in working out how to create a kind of music that is similar to this.. in a live scenario.. and then there’s all the kind of possible mutations of this…

With Kore [ and hands on controllers more genearally ] 

Kore, shown here:

represents one obvious set of possibilities. You can load up various software instruments, effects, and what not.. into Kore.. and control them via its buttons and knobs.. which you map to various parameters of the instruments / effects in question.. You have various pages of mappings that you can then move between.. allowing you real time control.. without a mouse.. and in a way were you can control multiple parameters at once.

Real time control of software, in this fashion.. radically changes the way you think, and how you work with.. the software.. it’s really awesome.

 A day or so latter:

Implications 

The full implications of real time hands on control of software in this fashion, and relative to this sorta production style are really.. well more then I can really lay out in full for you here today… but I can throw a bit at yea

Manipulating multiple parameters at once

As mentioned earlier… mousing around single parameters at a time produces a certain kind of organic evolution of the sounds.. hands on control is a very different beast.. we are not talking about… well there’s a certain artistry of performance.. kind of more power.. and with that power comes the need to know how to temper it.. and anyway.. there’s a good deal to explore here.

Beyond this.. things can get a little complex.. especially is we are using multiple controllers.. and the idea that we can now play with interrelationships on the performance level.

Recording Automation rather then Audio

A significant difference between the way I was tweaking away in Reaktor.. and tweaking away with controllers in a DAW is that we are now recording automation data of a performance.. and not simply the resultant audio.

This means we can go back in and edit the performance.. we can perform on one set of parameters on one take, and another on another take.. so that the results can become a good deal deal more complex in how they evolve over time..

There is a kind of negative.. which is.. well has to do with most modern music.. that you don’t really have to make choices.. when you can alway edit / adjust things latter… this is a kind of long conversation.. but basically it has to do with.. the creative process.. and being pushed into situations where you have to work your way out of the hard way.. and in so doing.. often that’s how brilliant things happen.. But without going to far into this topic.. I will say that ultimately its up to the artist, in how to relate to the technology on this level. 

Taking it to Ableton Live, and the joys of patterns.

I imagine the next phase of things is to take the whole production, and bring it into Ableton Live.. creating patterns.. using MIDI effects to tweak the patterns.. and make it so the whole production is produced this way…

Here we really get to thinking deeply about how to take this into the live arena.. also… we are getting out of Reaktor.. and using the rest of my instrument library.

This is sorta like.. “lets go do stuff in the usual studio” stuff. It’s hard to say too much about a path you’ve yet to walk but.. An Ableton Live based… pattern based.. compositional process.. can actually lead you into a world of more control.. more.. lets say design developed.. stuff.. then traditional linear sequencing… 

Basically.. you have a bunch of patterns.. and you play with how the different patterns play together.. this can be how you think of production and composition in the real design sense.. or it can be like the design of a framework for improvisation.

There’s perhaps more to say here.. but I’m tired..

Integration

The final subject is really integration.. to integrate this stuff with the stuff that I’m actually good at… or maybe the better way of putting it is where I’m already strong..

I see this kinds of hands on.. tweak it.. kind of organic evolution of sound.. as having certain elements that my more programmed.. crazy attention to detail music lacks.. In case you haven’t heard this stuff.. a reasonable example might be this remix of the Cobert Report Interview with Lawrence Lessig.. I did recently

BSO Steven Cobert Lawrence Lessig ReMix by Matt Searles

This track took me about a month to do.. there’s a hell of a lot more attention to detail then you might notice at first..  ( including a fair amount that doesn’t really come out when listened to streamed).. the problem with this track is perhaps mostly how short it is.. as so much of this sorta thing for me tends to be about taking a little trip.. and its hard to go that far in a couple of minutes.. In some ways you can listen to it as a prototype for the new direction of what we are calling my conventional work..  Even with whatever it’s flaws might be.. it does represent a step forward on that trajectory… 

I love the idea of taking a whole month to do a single track.. I mean just the level of detail you can achieve that way… that much love and attention to every moment.. of course it’s a little on the unrealistic side.. but still!

The integration can probably happen along multiple axises

1. If you create a music form where it literally takes a month to finish a couple minutes of music.. to have this along side music where in a day’s work can give you twenty plus minutes worth of music.. well.. now the month for a couple minutes is realistic.. 
2. I have this notion of a whole album that is of the tweak kind.. where via creative mixing.. the super programmed detail stuff.. sorta comes out of that world.. where in you’re really considering the album as a whole. ( which may not make a lot of sense for custom play lists )
3. The Tweak-age stuff could be an element inside of the super detailed programed sequence stuff.
4. There’s a lot of stuff I’m thinking about where.. you have.. say.. a kind of tweakage space reverb and delay inside of a deeply programmed mix..  

A Concluding Statement

Stretching is important.. and that’s really what this is about.. What’s slightly strange about this post is that it seems to almost emphasize the.. let call it objective facts.. over the sorta internal organizing principles that would be.. what is actually known.. the facts.. we must.. as Hunter Thompson would say.. buy the ticket, take the ride.. to really get at.. so it is a strange synthesis.. and we’ll have to see what happens.

In any event.. in the end.. this is just like a confession of one tiny piece in a much larger puzzle

Editors note [ brother new Ape V was like “yo, when we gonna get a new blog post from ya” and seeing as I had this one in draft form.. figured I’d finish it up and post it.. this is really a kind of subject point of view on the subject of remixing but.. with any luck, you can dig it ] 

So Evan’s suggested I get into remixing.. which on the surface sounded like.. well something interesting to try out.. it’s not something I’ve really done before.. so I haven’t been too sure that I’d be any good at it.. or.. how much work it would take to get good at it.. as a part of this.. he suggested I take a look at entering this contest to remix Empire State Human….

First Impressions

I started by listening to the Melancholic Afro track.. featuring Wofgang Flur.. a part of the original Kraftwork group.. and started to try and figure out what I was supposed to do.. that is “what is remixing anyway”.. what’s it all about.. and where could I take this music.

The early ideas where not so much the ideas of someone doing remixing.. as they were those of a mix engineer.. and when I download the original session material..  I somewhat freaked when I realize all the effects they used had been printed on the tracks  provided for the remix. 

When a mix engineer builds up a mix.. he or she uses a whole lot of effects.. mostly EQ and compression.. reverb, delays.. that kinda thing.. in such a way to make the tracks fit together in a certain sorta way.. into a mix.. if the effects are printed.. meaning  you get audio tracks.. with the effects in the recordings.. you loose a lot of flexibility in terms of how to mix them… cause there’s no getting those effects off the tracks.

First directions 

My initial reaction was… “well, I have some audio to midi conversion abilities in my software” which translates into software analyzing the recordings.. and creating MIDI performance data.. that can then be performed by various digital instruments.. thus allowing you to use your own sounds, more or less as if played by the band.. Besides this it also allows me to rearrange the melodic and harmonic material.

It turns out.. my project studio at this point, in terms of electronic music production tools, is very strong.. by professional industry standards. The areas where I feel the need to invest more in tend to be mix engineering and recording.. 

The result of all this is.. I probably have the tools to create a kind of new version of the track.. that is perhaps more to my aesthetic sensibilities.. and probably realize it on a very high level.

But then a strange thing happened

Direction shifts into Ableton Live

I’ve been haunting the local guitar center.. doing gear research and picking up a few things.. and generally shooting the shit with the sales staff. In one of those conversations one of the guys suggested that Ableton Live was a very good tool to do remixing with.. and of course I own Ableton Live.. 

Ableton is a loop sequencer with.. somewhat immature MIDI, recording, and mixing tools.. Because of the way I usually work.. I don’t really use Ableton that much.. and don’t really feel like I have a great mastery of it..  I, along with many other musicians, feel that Live has a kind of.. different paradigm for how you work with it.. and thinking in that paradigm doesn’t feel totally natural.. at least not yet.

But of course lots of people LOVE Live.. is it just that they are more the type who works with pattern sequencing as a pose to linear sequencing? I wonder this.. and yet, though I’ve always been more the one to go the linear sequencing route.. so much of my music is actually about patterns…

Jumping in

So I started out by loading the Melancholic Afro session into Live.. taking the tracks and creating loops out of them…

The process of creating Loops is.. interesting. You could create a loop that’s just like a normal repeating riff..  or you can create loops.. where based on where the start and end points of your loop is.. basically creates something very different then the original music.. like creating a glitch in it or something.. So, for instance.. I quickly created a drum part from what was originally fairly synth pop-e, and turned it into something more Slayer-esk.

Loop Envelops 

Ableton is very powerful in how you can work with loops.. even if I do crave more power… in that you can use “looping envelopes.” A looping envelop.. well an envelop is.. it controls a parameter.. So.. pan, volume, pitch, effect send, any element of how an effect unit is processing sound.. the envelop can control and automate.. and a looping envelop simply loops that parameter automation.

Also worth noting is that the envelop loop lengths do not have to conform to audio loop length.. and that you can have many envelop loops going.. that are all of different lengths.. which allows you to work with a kind of polymetric textural evolution.. that’s, say, awesome for ambient music.. and has a lot of creative compositional applications.. 

How things look from where I’m standing now

I have a kind of vision, along with a road map for getting there, for what sorta remix artist I might like to be.. and some sense of what I’m probably capable of.. and so it is that I see remixing Empire State Human’s Melancholic Afro as a one step in the process of getting there… lets see if I can kind of describe this a little bit.

All the software tools at my disposal have there own individual strengths and weaknesses.. and so you want to work in such a way as to maximize there strengths and minimize there weaknesses.. which ultimately brings us to the subject of workflow.. and workflow is currently the real challenge for me…

Working on a remix in Live.. I start out making loops.. loops that will allow me to reconstruct the music as it was.. but also loops that are like experiments.. explorations.. “lets try this.” And for each track.. of the original sessions.. we’ll have a whole number of loops. 

The next step is to arrange the loops.. this is really the compositional part.. It starts out by fiddling around playing different loops together.. and playing with possible orders for how we could move around from loop to loop.

It strikes me that there are some interesting things that could be done during this process.. We can take our loops.. or sections of loops.. or other material.. and convert them into REX loops.. perhaps for use in Reason or Kontakt.. sections could be treated as samples in Kontakt.. and different parts could be bent around in different ways to make sense in our evolving arrangement mix.. and of course things like audio to midi conversion.. or different pitch shifting technologies.. could be used to further manipulate things into a new form.

Next Day Some Time

All of this is basically “manipulation vocabulary” or tools of facilitating that.. the process of arranging is basically composing.. this in combination with mixing..

The way I plan to move forward on this project is to finish creating loops.. play with loops, arrange loops, mix loops..

This post is starting to wander around a bit.. so how about I talk about what I think is special in how what I’m doing.

I’m getting ready to slip into unconsciousness.. and feeling sorta in awe of how long it’s been since I’ve posted.. and all the 100s of drafts I’ve rejected inside of that time frame.. mixed with all the things I feel inspired to write about… So I figure I gotta post something.. and whatever it is, its got to be short.. so..

I’m thinking about electronic music a little bit.

Electronic music, to mind at this moment, is like the most incredible genera of music around.. I suppose this is in large part because it doesn’t really refer to a genera, but more a way of making music.. and if you’re familiar with how music is being made today.. I think it’s reasonable to say that at least 90% of everything made today is made on a computer.. and thus is electronic music.. even if we don’t generally view it as such.

But what I really dig is the seriousness of the genera.. or that there are areas of electronic music that are so serious.. be it from a compositional perspective.. philosophical sorta aesthetic perspective… and then.. you have club music, rave music.. dance music so to speak.. and then it goes so far as the music that underlies Rap.. or you think of the stuff going on in Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson…

History of Electro Acoustic Music 101 

The history of electronic music can probably be told in a variety of ways.. but basically you have these major universities.. and only a few of them.. back in the early early days.. that were able to afford these computers that would take up whole rooms.. big rooms at that.. that were the only places with the power to make it happen.. and so only a very few were able to get access to these things.. and so the early stuff has this rather serious classical sorta influence..

Eventually.. out comes these analog synths from folks like Moog.. made popular by Wendy Carlos and the like… and eventually made cheap enough that regular musicians could afford…

Now.. all these years latter.. there’s a hell of a lot of tools for electronic music that you can down load for free.. and then we have the commercial software..

Seriously Serious Avant Guard fun 

I’m getting ready to enter a phase where in I’ll call myself a serious electronic sound artist.. seems like a good way of putting it. Not that I ever wasn’t.. but now there’s a kind of new focus to it.

One of the areas I’m naturally attracted to is.. a kind of world of seriously serious seriousness.. of.. avant guard delights. Historically this is music Frank Zappa might call “ugly,” …ugly not being a negative term here. I think of the 60s revolutionary spirit.. the rethinking of basic values.. and the effect that some stuff became very difficult listening.. and something good for the more snobby among us.. to listen to and think we is better then them…  

Matt’s mitigation of the ugly 

LOL, of course I am better then them.. where’s my Thursten Howl voice? But um.. I’ve never meant to make music that was in anyway unapproachable. The issue of approachability is a design consideration.. But.. I’m also interested in exploring sorta far out ideas… 

I guess.. and I don’t know.. it’s hard to tell at this point.. but it seems like there’s certain compositional ideas.. ways of thinking.. a kind of.. set of things.. which kind of characterize my music at this point.. and then.. there’s a set of things that I’m exploring with the idea of adding new dimensions to it. So.. basically I have a set of strands.. all at varying levels of maturation.. that I basically weave together.

At the moment I started to write this post.. I’ve been contemplating the development of a whole lot of new strands… some of these strands I’ve been contemplating for the last.. almost 20 years.

The construction of these strands.. some of them anyway.. seems rather daunting.. steep learning curves required to get anywhere near my vision..  Should I speak of these? Well.. it would take a whole post to explore but a part of this but…

Algorithmic Composition

What we are talking about here.. basically, is writing programs that create compositions… Indeed create performances. Or perhaps we aren’t writing the program.. perhaps we are just setting up conditions..

My first thoughts on this matter… I was probably about 15 years old.. having just taken up guitar.. and was a bit of metal head.. Early on I had become interested in making music that was.. strange.. out there.. experimental… in part as a kind of philosophical reaction to the music I’d heard before.. it was a revolutionary spirit..

Let’s say we wanted to use an algorithmic approach to making heavy metal music.. how might we go about it? 

Theory Geek-O-Ree 

My view had been.. lets start with a scale.. create a randomly generated synthetic scale.. 8 tones.. where we could use a regular diatonic framework.. warped into our synthetic scale. From where we could have a probabilistic framework..  

Perhaps it would start by thinking about chord progressions for a riff.. or something like that.. divide time up into..  a few parts.. say what chord it is.. and that would be like the center around which the various instruments would play.. generally play one of the 3 notes that would make up that triad.. or perhaps playing the 7th, or perhaps playing a 3rd below the route..

We could.. at any given time divide up the chord.. saying this or that instrument would play around this or that note of the chord.. so you’re talking about a kind of harmonized modalism…

The Aesthetics of which are? 

In a certain way.. the kind of ideas I had were like a quantified version of how I actually make music… how I think about composition.. accept that my compositional framework… it’s like a way of thinking… and eventually.. in my process.. I leave my thinking behind.. go on this or that tangent.. and whatever.

I don’t actually have much of a music theory background.. what little I have is.. extrapolated, questions.. I eventually came to think of it as.. like being the product of an out dated cosmology… and so set out to build a new one… and I suppose that’s what my music actually is about. It’s really a kind of revelation of an intuition.

A few latter:

Think I better post this.. if for no other reason then to say I’ve posted something recently at least! 

So you’ll know doubt recall, if you’ve been following me for any length of time.. and closely enough to notice this sorta thing or remember it.. lol.. that I’ve been kind of excited about the possibilities of vocal synthesis. Vocal synthesis is a technology via which we use special kinds of synthesizers to… well sing. This is,  I think, an interesting subject.. if only from an academic perspective.. but for me it takes on special importance because.. I can’t really sing.. and it, at least potentially, could be the best way to bring lyrics to my music… or at least one key to it.

Generally.. for music to be popular, it needs vocals..  I’m not really aiming to be a pop sound artist.. but.. as kind of avant guard and experimental as many of my musical inclinations might be.. the music I make is not like.. an unapproachable high brow thing… it is a product of a certain type of aesthetic thinking.. it is a kind of searching, a kind of adventure.. and exploration. I love the feeling like.. I’m doing something original.. developing a unique voice… I’m.. even if it’s only on a compositional kind of level.. or on a kind of.. purely aesthetic level.. talking about certain things.. its a kind of sonic philosophical discourse.. it’s often described as “conceptual music.” All of this doesn’t make it unapproachable unless the soul metric of approachability is that it sounds like everything  you’ve already heard in your life..

On the subject of lyrics 

The possibilities of lyrics is.. both exciting and  terrifying for me. Without lyrics the music seems like it’s open to infinite interpretation.. and lyrics seem to.. suggest “and this is what this piece of music is about,” the implication being that it potentially limits interpretations..  Further.. can I even be a great lyricist? I mean.. as I strike out trying to do this, will it somehow work against what is good in my work?

I have, as it turns out, been writing lyrics since I was at least in the 8th grade… They have never really been anything I’ve been overly proud of.. never sure if they suck.. but occasionally I show them to people.. and some people really like them.. so what the hell, right?

My lyrics start out in a spirit that is very much coming from the same place as my music.. a kind of anarchical relationship to structure.. which is where the searching starts.. lets throw out notions of right and wrong, and build a new world with new values.. new ideas of right and wrong.. on the aesthetic level here of course.

My lyrics tend to be about a kind of cosmic searching.. a search for enlightenment.. It’s as if the writer has a certain persona.. and that persona can be both super smart, and super monstrous.. at best there can be a kind of mind bending quality to it that challenges, at least for the moment, you’re perception of the.. well just how you think about things… and it does this in a way that feels dangerous.

sometime the next day:

I’ve been writing all this crap and not posting it, so hopefully I can just get through this one fast.. already I’m not quite sure of the flow.. but what the hell, lets finish this puppy…

Cantor first impressions

I downloaded the Cantor demo sometime ago.. and wasn’t supper happy with it.. but it is pretty close to the only game in town.. at least on the Mac.. But the demo, as it turns out, is a version behind the real version.. so it was time to check out the current version.

The first challenge is learning how to use it. VirSyn’s ideas about interface design are a little.. well both dated and idiosyncratic..  and it doesn’t help that vocal synthesis is kind of a big jump away from how traditional synthesizers work…

You have this interface, and you draw in notes.. and on the notes you tell it what word you want that note to be… from here we can adjust various parameters of the note to create a vocal performance…

The first thing you start dealing with are phenomes.. which are component sounds of our language.. you type the word, it has a big old dictionary from which it finds the word.. and the component phenomes.. and you can adjust the phenome spacing in the note. There’s more to it then this, but this is the basics of it.

The first mega huge problem you run into is the interface.. which proves to be a little bit of a pain in your butt… as far as how to get working.. and even once you have it worked out.. it’s rather clumsy.. as a for instance.. hitting command Z for undo.. very frequently doesn’t undo what you just did in Cantor, but undoes the “why yes, I’d like to add Cantor to my project in my DAW” command.. resulting in the loss of hours of work.. and then some of the features don’t even seem to quite work.. but then.. I’m just a learner, so who knows.

After some time mucking around with it I did find a workflow that made sense.. It’s one of these programs where you have to learn to work around it’s limitations.. which.. sucks.. but.. the results were exciting.

How Cantor differs from it’s competition.

On the PC side of things there’s.. I wanna say its made by Yamaha… a similar instrument.. but the difference there is that the phenomes are not synthesized, they’re sampled… The result is that you can actually get fairly realistic realizations of singers.. where as with Cantor.. there’s no hiding the fact that its synthesized.

The choice, at least if you’re on a PC, between going with a sample based or synthesis based.. singing instrument.. is probably an aesthetic / what sort of applications do you want to explore with it sorta thing: There are lots of places where robot type voices sound pretty cool, after all… which might be particularly true for someone like myself.. who does mostly electronic music anyway. 

Some other options I’ve considered:

One option is to attempt to sing… and use a program like melodyne to fix my wrong notes. Here the problems are a couple fold:

1. It “may be” that hitting the wrong notes is not all that’s wrong with my singing. There’s software out there, of a not unsubstantial cost, that one can use to fix these problems as well… but of course thats more money and more work.
2. The kind of gear needed to record really good vocals isn’t cheap, and I haven’t really invested in it.
3. The work flow would involve.. write the song, practice the song, record the song, edit the badness.. which ends up taking quite a lot of time and energy.. so that… even given the problems we find with Cantor.. it actually has a much better workflow for.. kinda how I’m doing things now.

Another option is Vocoding 

I don’t think I’ve really played with Vocoding too much.. the VirSyn effects bundle I recently invested in includes a Vocoder.. One that got a really good review in a recent issues of Sound on Sound just recently.. so I’m ready to try it out… 

Basically.. you have two signals.. signal one we look at and analyze… what is the amplitude of what frequency? You have a kind of grid of so many frequencies.. on the second signal.. we apply EQ… that imprints on the second signal.. what happened on the first.. if this frequency is this loud on the first, turn the EQ that far up on the second.. for that part in our grid. 

So this is how vocoding works… and the results tend to be.. “and now we have a funky talking robot.” There’s more applications for vocoding then this.. but this would seem to be the main one. 

latter: 

There’s probably more to say, but I must post… 

Ok, allow me to give you the quick-e of the story on this one.

I did this as a part of the NaSoAlMo challenge.. which is a challenge to see if you can create a solo album in a single month. You can check out what other folk’s NaSoAlMo projects here. Interesting stuff.

Now creating a solo album in a month is no easy feat.. the amount of work that can go into one of these things can be crazy.. it often forces you to work in different ways then you might other wise work.. and here in lys much of the value to participating.. In my own case.. I spent a little more then a week of this month in bed, sick.. doing about as much work on my laptop as I could.. 

So, at the end of it.. I feel like it was real accomplishment.. The results I’ve ended up with.. are what I now consider a rough draft. My feeling about it changes daily from “wow this really sucks” to “wow this is really amazing,” and so… well I really want to ask for you’re feed back on what you think of this work.. My plan is to go in and fix the problems I have it with it.. finished what is not really finished, and and add in a few other tracks.. and kinda go from there..

Ok.. enough talk, here’s the the album!:

 [editor’s note.. it looks like imeem won’t let me let you have the music for free… so.. here it is for free on last.fm.] 

So I’m giving the whole thing away for free.. I hope you can dig it… and if you’d like to help support what I’m doing.. turns out you can embed this play on your facebook, myspace.. your blog.. and just about anywhere else… and nothing would be more helpful then you’re sharing.. well.. lol, your feed back comes close!

Ok, so I’ll end this post with a rundown own of what needs to be changed / plan of attack / my personal reactions to it.. track by track.

1.  Yet Another Another Ambient Attempt: Kore was making everything crash.. so I had to go Kore-less.. There’s 3 things to be changed here.. #1 Is to fix drums.. there going through a guitar rig.. and there’s some issues I have with how this works.. and it really changes the ecology of the track when it works right.. #2 There’s some clipping going on.. which sucks.. and #3.. this is universally true of nearly all the tracks.. but what I want to do is put, as much as is possible.. the tracks through my Liquid Mix 16.. which uses dynamic convolution technology to essentially sample various class EQs and Compressors.. which are really great for a certain kind of subtle coloration of the tracks.
2. More Aggressive, Sorta: I’m just not really sure about this track.. 
3. Lets Do Something good, or try to anyway: It’s an experiment.. the field recording stuff was taken the same night as the pictures of the album cover.. One way or another I might like to give this one a little more attention
4. IdkbutIveBeenTold mix: This is maybe my favorite track on the album.. though I’m not sure about the Timpani at the beginning.. it features something like 30 instruments? One of the instruments is a stand in for the vocals.. which will be performed via Cantor.. a vocal synthesizer.. so I have to program the performance for that.. as well as adjust the mix for that.. and it’s not quite finished length wise.. there’s more lyrics that need adding
5. Context: This is a funny one which I meant to make a good deal longer but am sorta fond of as it stands.
6. Seeifwecanworkfaster: Mainly I plan to rip apart the mix on this.. 
7. canwedometal_ mix final: Well.. I need to basically rip out the bass.. or play with that.. the guitars need to be better realized.. I want to put some sorta vocals in there.. the drums ought to be developed more.
8. Super ambient: I don’t know.. it is what it is.
9. experiment: I see this as a first step in a certain direction.. I’m not quite sure how I feel about it.. but I like how it functions as a part of the larger album
10. MTFS thing mix Final: Here we have another experiment.. again I’m not sure about it.. not at all.. I think it’s a path I need to go down further before I start getting results I really like.

So yeah.. that’s the album.. I kinda like how it works at the moment.. as a whole.. though I’m not supper in love with any of the individual parts.. but it is sorta cool to have created this inside of a month.. to all of a sudden have all this new work to share.. so I hope you can dig it.. and again, comments would be great.

That’s right.. I finished it.. a new album.. or a rough cut of the new album.. and my mood on it is quite a bit better then it was yesterday.

The album is a journey.. I like it much more as a collection of tracks then I like any of the tracks individually. As a collection I think there might be a reasonable amount of ass kicking going on. The ass kicking is in.. all the little trips it takes you on… that’s what strikes me as potentially powerful about it anyway. 

There’s a lot that’s wrong with it.. though most of what’s wrong is fairly minor.. which is why I call it a rough draft.. and there are a few tracks that definitely need to be finished.. that are simply works in progress. There are tracks that I’m not sure about.. but still strike me as interesting little sonic adventures.

Doing the NaSoAlMo thing.. this now being my second year doing it..  I seem to come away with this feeling that.. often in the creative process you fight to push you’re work in a particular direction.. but that you really can.. go in the opposite direction of you’re taste.. of you’re habits, of your judgement, and find that what you got is actually pretty good.

Generally.. this is common knowledge to the artist.. we must go off on these little adventures every now and again.. to broaden our scope.. get off the well trotted ground.. many of these directions, as I look at them now.. strike me as early first steps.. that whatever possibilities of greatness they might posses… it will take a good deal more adventuring to really discover.. and so, I suppose, we wait for our next project.

Yes, there’s a level I want to get my work to that I don’t think I’ve really achieved yet.. I suppose to achieve that.. I’d have to work for about a year.. at least as hard as I’ve worked this past month.. Or at the very least I’d have to work this hard.. without a finite deadline.. working till I say “why yes, this work is done,” and then, once I have my track collection… say “ok time to put this out.” Again.. we’ll have to see.

There’s much work, of course, that I haven’t put out as “an album” that waits to be a part of it..  some of that you can hear on my podcast.. some of it I’ve released for a short moment via twitter.. if you haven’t to be following me at the time.. and happened to be online at the time, and happened to click the link at the time.. well, you got it… or I make mention of it here or there..  

Next morning:

I’m excited for new adventures, and figure I should just post.

[editor’s note: Matt wrote most of this last night] 

Ok, so the album isn’t done.. but it’s nearly done.. or a rough draft of it will be done by tomorrow.. [tonight] with the need for more work to be done in the coming month. It’s difficult to be too ruthless in one’s self criticism.. when one spent more then a week in bed sick.. Particularly when you consider that to do a solo album in a month is.. no easy matter to begin with!

As it stands.. I’m not real happy with my work… It’s just not quite good enough for me.. Once I finish the rough edges of it.. and maybe throw in some other tracks.. I might like it more.. or be more happy with it..

Not Good Enough?

Well.. I have big ambitions.. what I really want is work to represent myself as a sound artist… work that I could show you and you’d be like “wow,” assuming you were the sorta person who’d go for the sorta thing I do…

What this means.. in practice.. is you really want something that’ll grab someone and make you go “wow.” I don’t think any of this work really does that. That’s not to say the work isn’t strong, or doesn’t have strengths.. but for me, as I look at it now.. the weaknesses keep it on earth…  

The Problem this presents me with.

Well, there is the question of just what my goal might be here.. If I had “wow work” then the work of promoting it.. well I imagine that “wow work” has a potential for catching fire… and developing it’s own momentum.. if you can just get it that spark going strongly enough…  without that.. I think you probably have to fight a good deal harder.. to get a good deal less far.

So…  I feel the need to get some really good work… before I go to crazy trying to promote any it… There’s some chance that I might have that chance in short order.. as I’ll likely find myself working on scoring a documentary soon… which will likely mean yet another album’s worth of new work..

Beyond this.. there have been a few tracks I’ve made over the course of the last year or so.. that ought to be added to the album.. and maybe with all that.. It’ll be that much better…  so we’ll see.

Promising signs

What is promising, at least to me.. is the feeling that.. along the way I found new possibilities for where my work might go…  directions I’m excited to explore. We’ll see how far I get with that.

Stan’s Plan

So… could I maybe formulate a plan at this point? Anything I give here will just be some.. well what might make sense from the point of view of the nights temperament… but lets take a swing at it anyway, shall we?

One way or another I want to steadily continue creating music.. I don’t think I can keep it as front and center as it has been this last month.. But I’d love it if I could keep enough of a focus on it so that.. well I got somewhere with some new music.. that I was happy with.. in not too much time.

I want to do a promotional campaign.. one where I try and get some bloggers / podcasters to talk about what I’m doing.. get a little press here and there, get some radio play somewhere…. at least try and get the ball rolling.

There is the video blog / internet tv show-ish thing to try and get off the ground.

I must, of course, redesign this site…

I really want to make an effort to get on top of some 3D graphics stuff.

Take the rough draft and make it finished. 

Ok.. so that’s a bit of it.. not including collaborations..   

Next Morning:

I just wrote out about an hours wroth of stuff.. only to lose it.. I’m feeling terribly frustrated.. so I guess I’ll just post it as is….  

In the last entry I posted, at least as of me sitting here writing this, I started to talk about this kind of Jazz esk production of mine.. As it stands I think this might be the weakest of the tracks I’m doing for this years NaSoAlMo challenge.. but still, seeing as I’m in the middle of working on it, it seems worth talking about some. 

As stated earlier.. It features an old B4 type organ, an up right bass, violin, trumpet, and drums.. so just from the perspective of sounds.. timbers.. it’s very jazz-e sounding. The real trouble for me.. is that I’m not much used to this kind of production.. the kind of production where you do a lot of MIDI programing in order to create what might sound like an authentic jazz band.

The trouble is not so much in the struggle for making something sound authentic.. and that’s not to say it sounds all that authentic.. the struggle is in finding a way to do something great with these sounds, working in this manner.. I would describe most of the music for this track as a kind of searching… a searching for something that might sound great..

[editor’s note: Matt would like to apologize for his piss pour writing of this post.. he’s been very sick.. crazy sleep patterns, often out of it.. and I’m sure if he worked harder at it, he could come up with a hell of a lot of other excuses] 

How electronically creating “authentic jazz” differs from electronic music more generally (or at least my electronic music more generally) 

When you work with electronic music the way I do, you’re working with something that’s.. very concrete, right there in front of you… a set of sounds. You can do certain things with those sounds.. to combine them in certain ways.. but much of that vocabulary is not at my disposal here.. as that would not result in an authentic sorta Jazz thing…

So it’s a little liking tying one hand behind your back.. and you think “well, time to learn to use these other muscles more, so….”

Relationships to Musical Compositional Theory 

This track’s harmony and melody are more or less par for the course for me.. at least for starters. My normal dealings with harmony and melody are…. abstract.. in someway disembodied from traditional approaches… we are off in the land of the conceptual… and though I suppose what I’m creating is a kind of far out Jazz.. there is still need to kind of sit down and bring this stuff back to earth.. which means.. thinking about these things in more conventional ways.

I can right traditional melody… I can even right traditional melody that is “kinda” good… the basic ideas of music theory exist in me.. not as something I actually think about but just something I know.. as you might know about gravity as you endeavor to go for a walk… I mean you don’t actually have to think about this stuff..  but because so much of my music is… somehow about trying to transcend anything like a conventional thinking… So I don’t normally have to deal with this stuff.

An attitude I sometimes take is “well hell, lets just throw some notes around without bothering to think to much about there implications.” There’s a lot circle of 5th stuff going on.. there’s a lot of.. areas where we are moving through a… framework that isn’t really that out there..  but it’s as if that framework is really just to facilitate utter madness… until such time as the madness overtakes the structure.. and we totally leave the world of the known…

It’s as if the structure was a preconception.. and when reality was confronted it was abandoned for the voice of the muse…  there we go.

So.. I can surely apply, and indeed  am.. those ideas about structure…  but.. without my usual vocabulary… many things become naked.. and don’t work so well.

Orchestration

Orchestration is probably a good example.. Conventionally people learn music buy understanding it in terms of harmony, melody, and orchestration… as these 3 differentiated categories.  The practice of music making is a little bit different.. because they’re not truly so differentiated.. this differentiation is, after all, a projection of the mind..

None the less.. in a traditional compositional process, orchestration is often the final element.. which basically comes down to what instruments should play what.

Now the way I work is usually to use electronic instruments.. and in this context.. we can synthesize the very timbers..  In a certain way.. it’s as if we are approaching issues of orchestration on a kind of pscyho-acoustic kind of level. And indeed.. the process of creating a mix, at least for the sort of work I generally do.. is really about orchestration.

To fully appreciate what I’m trying to talk about might require a history lesson of sorts.. or about the relationship of the concert hall to the orchestra.. how this shapes the sound… and maybe a history of recording..

Well whatever, we won’t get to that here cause I don’t really know it well enough to tell it..

How I normally approach orchestration 

Instrument organizations 

Well let me give an example of how mixing is normally a part of orchestration in my work.. and kinda explain how this works.

I have in my mind certain categories of sounds..

• What is generally referred to as pads.  The term Pad actually comes from mixing.. it’s something you put in your mix to “glue” elements together.. Which is typically something that’s important to stereo mixing.. as a pose to mono.. however, in my work these tend to be more like “ambient pads.” Here we will have long sustained notes.. that possibly evolve over time.. that kind of hang in the air.. 
• Leads: You’d use a lead instrument as a kind of solo instrument.. in my way of thinking these are sounds with short attack times.. that generally play rather quickly.. fast moving passages.
• Pitched percussion: For me, pitched percussion fall into two categories.. the first is one that has both a short attack, and a short release… These are good when you’re music is getting rather aggressive. The second category is pitched percussion that has a longer release.. or perhaps it’s being fed into a delay.. so that it continues to linger in the air.. these basically get treated in a similar way as ambient pads.. accept that they’ll provide more of an accent.. as they have the short attack time
• None pitched percussion: This really functions in a similar way as the pitched percussion, accept that we aren’t really thinking about melody or harmony.. its more like, low, mid, and high… and with some thought to the attack and release times.. and how that will effect the over all mix.

I suppose, that’s more less the story… Or that’s the main categories I’m thinking in.. though in practice these broad ideas become relative to what’s going on.. in terms of what is defined by what.. another words.. something that might normally fit in one category.. now goes into another category as the ecology of the context shifts, if that quite makes sense.

Next comes the issue of mix stuff. 

Thinking about mix basically has just few things to worry about.. which is frequency space and our virtual sound stage.

Frequency Space

All sound is made of fluctuations of amplitude… that sorta follows a pattern.. relative to frequency space.. which is to say “what frequencies are fluctuating.” When you have two instruments where there frequencies overlap.. whichever instrument is the louder.. or whichever frequency is the louder.. is what will be heard. Thus we have the issue of “frequency masking” where by the less loud stuff.. isn’t heard, or is “masked.”

Stuff is always over lapping..  which isn’t necessarily a problem… but sometimes is. When it is a problem.. there are generally 2 solutions.

1. Is to place them at opposite sides of your stereo field.. so if one is coming mainly from the left speaker, and the other from the right.. you ought to be able to hear the details of both.
2. We have EQ… we can isolate different instruments into there own frequency space by.. basically turning up the part of that instrument’s frequency we want to come through.. and turning down those frequencies of the competing sounds.. we don’t want to conflict with… In practice we do this with all our instruments till they all work….

I should say a few other words about EQ…

1. It is almost always better to turn down a frequency then turn up a frequency 
2. There are certain guidelines for how to EQ different instruments.. or how modifying certain frequencies of them.. well effect there sound.. which is one of the things you think about while trying to isolate them into there own frequency space.

Ok.. so that’s the basics.. a conversation on compression would normally fit in right about here.. but we’ll skip on over to the subject of our virtual sound stage.

Virtual Sound Stage 

Basically we are talking about how how close or far a sound seems to be from us, and where it is in relationship… well left to right..

A sense of distance can be achieved via volume level, as well as what proportion of that sound is going into a reverb. Further.. “darker reverbs,” which is to say reverbs with less prominent high frequencies.. will help make the sounds seem further away… as well as reverbs with a longer “pre delay” which is the length of time between the sound hitting the reverb, and us hearing the reverb sound back.

Generally, with reverbs also comes the topic of delay… which can have a similar effect… In any event.. mixing you’re instruments into multiple reverbs, and indeed delays.. perhaps with some other effects like.. well lets say EQ and Compression… is how how we create a sense of depth in our mixes.

How the mix relates to orchestration. 

Reverbs and delays have the power to effect.. to blur.. both frequency space and our attack, decay, and release times… of any of our instruments.. thus.. if you put a lot of reverb and delay on a snare.. it sorta becomes “ambient pad esk.” To the extent to which our categories are “ecologically contextually dependent,” how sounds are mixed can change what sorta category they fit into.

The result is.. my production style, with its “kinetic mixing” aka.. heavy levels of automation of these mix elements.. gives me a lot of flexibility in how I combine my sounds… 

A sorta central idea in my work is the idea of “holistic thinking” or that.. the categories we use to divide up reality, ought to be driven by the questions / challenges we are dealing with at any particular point in time. Also.. we don’t have to deal with them in any particular linear order.. So everything from melody, to harmony, to orchestration, to performance, to recording, to mixing.. 

I’m to tired, as of this writing, to fully go into the virtues of this sort of conceptual frame work.. what I think is sorta amazing about it.. why I work in this manner.. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Back On Earth; how this relates to our Jazz esk production.

Well.. this whole idea of working holistically.. is sorta ripped apart for us. The mix is the first thing that’s done.. the first thing is “and this is where these instruments are in space.” As we compose the music.. we deal with the implications..

Latter:

Ok, this is long and not terribly well written.. I apologize for the latter.. I’m sick and slightly out of it.. but thought I should post something anyway.   

So I want to talk about my progress on this here project to try and make an album in a month… as a part of the NaSoAlMo thing..

In terms of my vision for my work, in terms of where I want to take my work.. The work I’m producing is not on the level I want.. You simply can’t give stuff the love and attention needed to bring this vision to full fruition.. not in a month.. not a whole albums worth of stuff.. 

All that said.. Some of the new work is reaching, at least in certain senses, levels that I don’t believe my work has reached before.. Getting some distance from some of this stuff provides me with a new insight.. on the quality of some of this stuff..  It’s really quite good I think.

I’m at a place where I’m generating about a minutes worth of audio a day.. The goal, the rules of the challenge.. is that you need to make a bit more then 29 minutes worth of stuff.. On my current trajectory I don’t think I’ll make it.. So I’m going to have to try some somewhat radical experiments to get there..  

It certainly hasn’t been helping that I’ve been really sick..  

Waking up sometime the next night: 

What seems to be happening is.. you have this question of “how long does it take to do X.” X generally represents a fairly simple idea.. Lets say we’re part way through making this musical piece and we say “I’d like to have some kind of a shimmering pad come in here like this.”

“Like this” might mean… well.. we’re going to automate pan, 4 reverb sends, volume.. we’ve got to give it some notes to play… there could be some pitch bending going on.. modulation… synth patch parameter tweaking… 

In practice..  The music I’m making does have a very high detail level.. and it is amazingly complex.. There’s lots of places where I was struggling up against one or another thing.. sections I thought were quite problematic at the time.. but then, once I have some distance from it.. wow, it’s actually quite good. 

But.. the detail level I’d like to get to.. for certain things, isn’t totally there.

Let me see if I can begin to explain.. I know this is probably rambling a little bit.. When you have one of those “basic ideas” for how something is to work.. nested in it are.. the considerations.. almost like “best practices” for achieving a given result. We are always trying to push on it.. to make the results better.. but we find that in the interest of time.. we are instead asking “what is good enough?”

So, in your mind.. you have this notion of “a simple idea” and then you have “what needs to be done to achieve this simple idea.” What happens as we get more and more into a project where time is the most important thing.. and now how much work it’s going to take to do a thing.. is going to effect both the choices you make, and how you implement those choices.

In the end, of course, the music is nothing but an end product of a lot of choices.

The tension is.. you want to make it as good as is possible.. what seems to be happening is.. we become less detail orientated..  and we look for “can we repeat that riff over here.” 

Trying to get concrete

Issues of a hacked together a mix 

Right now I’m working on a project that is sorta Jazz esk.. It features a Jazz organ, upright base, violin, drum kit, and trumpet. The organ is via Native Instruments B4, and everything else comes from the Kontakt sample library.

The first issue we run into is.. Well.. this is the one project in our over all project where instruments aren’t moving around.. things stay static.. because they’re real world instruments. The time it takes to set Kontakt up so that all of it’s instruments come out into DP on different channels.. and we automate stuff via those channels.. is more then I feel willing to deal with… thus we have some potentially serious issues.

Kontakt has a built in mixing environment.. so you can mix whatever is made via Kontakt.. into a stereo out and leave it at that.. but we do end up with a couple serious issues.

#1 We’d really like each instrument to be in it’s own place in space.. and we’d like all our instruments to be in roughly the same space.. We’d like to have it sound coherent.. This is easy enough inside of Kontakt.. Kontakt even has convolution reverb.. so it sounds like we’re really in a a convert hall, but what of our organ? We can’t put the organ in the same space as the other instruments!

What I end up doing is creating an aux channel in Digital Performer, with a convolution reverb in it.. and put a little of the Kontakt out into it, and put a bit of the organ into it.. and.. the results are “good enough for government work in the Bush administration.” 

#2 In Digital Performer, though this is a feature I almost never use, when you send an channels audio to an aux send.. you can also set it’s pan position in that send. For most of how I work this is both unnecessary and would create a tun of extra work… But.. if you’re creating a static mix..  and you have an instrument on the left side of that mix.. having its effect go to the opposite side.. helps with symmetry, helps with making the mix sound coherent.. helps in a lot of ways.

Well ether I don’t know how to do this yet, or Kontakt doesn’t have this feature..

So I really have a kind of difficult mix situation..

Sample Instrument Performance Programming 

To further complicate matters.. we’re talking about some fairly sophisticated sample based instruments.. some of which are from the esteemed Vienna Symphonic Orchestra Library..  These are really amazingly expressive sample instruments.. where via the magic of MIDI programming.. you can make sound quite real. But it does mean that you have to spend a lot of time programming key velocities, sample switching, modulation and pitch wheel bends, and sometimes midi volume moves… so that we can control the violin’s bowing, or the trumpets blowing.. in somewhat fine detail…

Conclusions 

So suddenly we end up in a situation where we need to try and be subtle! Where the time it takes to program things is.. a good deal.. even though, by making the mix static, we’ve removed the need to worry about mix automation programming.

As I write this, I question myself as to if I’ll keep working on this the way I’ve described here so far, or if I’ll finally go “yeah, we need to bring all the Kontakt Instruments out onto individual stereo channels so we can mix it properly…  which is probably more crucial for a static mix!

In any event.. this is some of where I’m at.

But anyway.. how it’s feeling:

What is kind of amazing is.. I do have all this new work now.. it is starting to look likely that I’ll have a whole album by the end of this process.. And I do think the album is of a very high quality..  And having that is a kind of amazing feeling. 

Now if I can just finish the damn thing! 

Haven’t been blogging so much lately..  bad Matt!  But how about a short little post? ( He says realizing short never happens for him )

So there’s basically 2 things worth talking about today.. or thoughts, or things I seem to be up to. #1 Is the music production stuff and #2 Is thinking about promotional efforts.

The Music Production Adventures

Though I didn’t post anything.. I have been writing about a new project I’ve started… inside of Ableton Live.. This project reached new hightes today.  So lets explore a little:

Of all the DAWs in my sonic arsenal, Ableton Live is the one I’m weakest with..  I have certain ways of working.. that I’ve been evolving for the past 15 or so years..  and I’m not sure how Live could fit into that way of working. Usually I think it has the potential to bring my work in new directions.. and so that’s some of what I find myself exploring…

The first stage in the current adventure has been creating loops.. I have a rather large library of audio.. music I’ve made, stuff I’ve recorded…  The process is one of loading up the audio files, and selecting loop points. Live will do the beat matching for you.. so whatever the tempo of the original work… Live will match it to the tempo..  

But the real fun comes from shaping looping envelops that control the parameters of whatever effect you might want to place on your loop.. Via various processing you “design loops” that are often unrecognizable.. from there original. This is, at least for me, a fun and unpredictable creative process… which yields results I wouldn’t other wise be able to achieve. 

Today, however, brought all this stuff to a crazy new level. As I began digging around my hard drives in search of audio files.. I started to find some interesting things….

A shape forms

Some of what I found were recordings made..  Well the podcast episode I recorded hours after my mom had passed… Left phone messages from my therapist and collection agencies.. There’s a collection of sounds that.. as I started putting together an arrangement of this stuff..

Well it was probably some of the most emotional sound art I’ve ever heard in my life.. It was powerful as hell..  It was also emotional draining, to the point that I felt on the verge of an emotional breakdown from going there.. but I think it was also therapeutic.. and I have this feeling that I really do need to go there.

So that’s basically that on the music production side of things..

Online Music Marketing

While running a few errins, I was seduced by the evil Barns and Nobel.. in to buying “Web Marketing for the Music Business” by a Mr. Tom Hutchison.. brought to us by Focal Press… 

Well I think this is about the best book on the subject I’ve come across. As a “social media peep” I’m hyper up on how marketing and communications are changing in this new media space.. Even if I’m not executing on it, I am an expert on social media strategy…  or something of one.. ( seeing as most of the people I look up to as mentors / experts in this area claim not to be experts these days )… In any event… this puts me in a unique place to evaluate such a book.. never mind all the music marketing type books I’ve read in the past.. and I’m here to tell you that this book is totally top notch.. from what I’ve been able to gather thus far.

So reading a book like this brings me to rethinking my strategy / shtick..  

So I’ll kinda leave this post short.. with just a couple finishing comments:

I’m feeling inspired by the promotional adventures ahead.. but also somewhat in awe of the challenges of it..  so wish me luck…